The best Spotify alternatives to ease your conscience

There are loads of options for getting new music into your ears if you're fed up with Spotify.

It's no secret that Spotify is the dominant player in the music streaming market, with 293 million paid subscribers and 761 million monthly active users across both paid and free tiers. Along with massive market dominance has come a fair bit of controversy in recent years. As the biggest music-streaming platform, Spotify is usually the first mentioned in the discussion about whether artists are fairly compensated for their work. The math around that question is obvious — buying a digital album outright typically costs between $10 and $15 depending on where you buy it, while a Spotify Premium subscription costs $13 a month in the US.

Fair pay is far from the only drama surrounding Spotify, though. Founder and former CEO Daniel Ek (now the company's executive chairman) made waves last year with a $694 million investment in defense technology start-up Helsing; he's also now the company's chairman. That move brought what was probably the loudest backlash against Spotify yet, with some artists pulling their catalogs from the service. That didn't stop the company from continuing to grow, though — in the last quarter, revenue, profit and monthly active users all continued to increase.

Finally, Spotify's recent embrace of AI is troubling, to say the least. The company's lack of interest in doing any real policing of AI-generated content has led to AI music showing up all over the platform. The company says it will soon label AI-generated musicians as " AI Personas ," but that relies on the humans controlling those accounts to self-report. It'll also use human checks and AI-powered reviews on popular accounts to see if they should be marked as a "Likely AI Persona."

Separate to the influx of AI-generated music, there's  also been a recent embrace of AI features for users that have questionable value. The app has had an AI-powered DJ for a few years now which is relatively harmless, and you can use natural language prompts to generate playlists as well. Probably the most distasteful of them comes via a licensing agreement with Universal that will let users create remixes and covers through AI. It'll be an add-on to Premium plans when it launches, so at least it'll theoretically generate more revenue for artists — but that's about the only saving grace.

If any of this has been on your mind, the good news is that there are tons of different ways to get music. Unfortunately, almost all of them come with caveats of their own, whether it's cost, convenience or just the headache of migrating your music to another service.

If you're concerned with how Spotify compensates the musicians on its platform and whether other similar services are "better," it's not a simple answer. While there's a lot of talk about what artists make per stream on Spotify and competitors like Apple Music, it's important to know that there isn't a set "per stream" number.

At a high level, music streamers put all of the money they receive from subscriptions (ad revenue for services with ad-support tiers also gets included) and take an initial cut. Spotify says it's "roughly" a third of that total revenue; that money goes into Spotify's pocket, but also pays for all the costs associated with the service. I haven't seen any streaming service say exactly what cut they take, but the ones I've talked to have all indicated that the 30-ish percent range is typical.